Geographically dispersed teams are reality in essentially every large company (Marconi, Ford, Boeing, IBM), any company who acquires another, and many start-ups. Travel is expensive, inefficient, and undesirable (the romance is gone). Resources (people) are expensive, limited, and are difficult to relocate.
There is a need for substantially improved communication between members of a geographically dispersed team by upgrading the communications systems available to team members to more closely mimic the range of communications they would have if they were collocated. The telephone as it is known today in regard to audio communication has become a natural extension of everyday life and meets many of the needs of team members or users to communicate with each other. An upgraded communications system must be as reliable and second nature to users as the telephone, and essentially be a telephone but add at least a dimension of video so it too is second nature to a user. The quality of audio and video, including delay of such communications systems, must be sufficient to encourage users to communicate naturally. The screen, speakers, microphone, and possible thousands of miles between the users should disappear.
The communication environment needs to provide each user with the ability to “just know” who is in a conference, what the other users are doing, and when and how to talk to them. Users should be able to have “water cooler” impromptu discussions, even remote lunches, without the overhead of thinking about the mechanism.
All actions and features should be obvious, without the need for training. Target users include computer experts and novices, as well as telephone power users and minimalists. There should be a very low to nonexistent “geek factor.” Information such as names, phone numbers, schedules, location, remote time, presence status, call history, etc., must be easily available. The instant availability of telephone numbers and the link to getting them dialed should make this communications system the preferred real-time source for such information. It should interface to existing contact information sources such as Exchange, PDA, etc., and appropriately be used to minimize user actions without compromising user control.
Low latency is a key factor in enabling natural communication, as anyone who has used a satellite link on a telephone call will know only too well. To date, there have been significant technical problems with latency in video communications where the total delay of the video encode, typical network delay and video decode produce unacceptable results. The RTP mechanisms have not produced an acceptably low jitter rate with low delay. The consequence is that current video conferencing technology does not achieve the transparency necessary for really effective communication. There has been no acceptable presentation for multi-user conferences created on a screen surface intended for the desktop. The weakness in existing teleconferencing systems is the communication effectiveness as the number of participants increases. The control, management, interface, and performance of the system tend to degrade, and the transparency of the media is lost, when more than two people are involved in the conference.
The present invention is intended to be a volume product that can replace the most common forms of desktop phones and provide a list of enhanced features to provide solutions to the problems identified above. The present invention adds real-time vision and other aides to the current communications environment and at last achieves a genuine sense of telepresence. In other words, the ability to interact remotely with one or more people in a much closer approximation to a physical meeting than can be achieved current day tools. The present invention provides for the following.                It has the potential to dramatically improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of communications within a geographically dispersed organization.        Efficiency will improve by including the visual dimension to communication, recognizing that we obtain up to 70% of communication content visually, and this is absent from audio only communication.        Efficiency will improve through the ability to immediately facilitate event driven (ad hoc) rather than planned communication as this former category represents some 70% of all local communication which we can now extend to remote communications.        Efficiency will improve from users having this tool continuously available on their desks for immediate use, like their current telephone, in comparison to most current video conferencing that are in dedicated rooms and have to be booked in advance.        Efficiency will improve through the distribution of ‘presence’ information, ensuring more communication attempts complete successfully.        Efficiency will improve by having separate communications and computing platforms simultaneously available to the user.        Efficiency will improve by reducing the time to create a relevant discussion group to resolve an issue, significantly speeding up the decision cycle and by reducing significantly the need to travel.        The reduction in travel not only frees up more productive time, but could save a great deal of cost in airline and hotel fares.        Effectiveness will improve by ensuring that the most relevant people are involved in a decision, and not just those “at hand.”        Effectiveness will also improve because of the improved personal relationships that can develop when high quality vision is added to simple phone contact.        It will allow expertise available at a specific location to be “on-tap” anywhere within the organization at a moment's notice, making much more productive use of such expertise.        It could be the vehicle for much improved management to staff communication—from the senior company managers to the whole company, and help engender team spirit and commitment.        And as with any really new tool, clever folk will invent ways of exploiting it to the benefit of the organization we could not at this stage even guess at.        
The present invention is an extension of the phone system that users are so familiar with, i.e., it is a communications platform and not a PC application. Instant access, reliability and simple intuitive functionality are some of the key attributes that come with it.
Some of the video collaboration products that currently exist are the following.    Microsoft NetMeeting. Anyone who tried to use it knows its limitations: it is excruciatingly slow. Its video is close to unusable. The audio is poor. The user interface is hard to understand for all but basic calls.    Polycom, ViaVideo™. Viavideo™ is an H.323 appliance that contains a camera and some audio processing in a monitor-top housing with a USB connection to a PC. The product generates H.261 quality video at up to 384 K with the output on the PC screen in a window, and a screen emulation of an IR remote control for user interface. The video is acceptable, with the camera relatively poor. Audio quality is acceptable-echo cancellation is available, but the overall impression does not achieve the necessary transparency needed for effective communication. What the video does is to offer a level of video quality at a new price point, around $600. There is no presence, no telephone integration, no CTI. The size of the window of the PC screen limits what else one can do.    Webex, is a web-based conferencing product offered primarily as a service. The primary problem with it is bandwidth, because the current product is Internet (capital I) based. The present implementation is server based, which further limits what it can do. Webex has much more primitive shared surface options than NetMeeting, and offers low quality audio, no video, no CTI, no presence, etc.    Teraglobal is based on an Apple platform, which is presented not as a videophone but an entire application platform of which communication is but one capability. The technology is intimately tied to this platform and the underlying “DigitalDNA” Motorola PowerPC processor it runs on. The entire product is proprietary, having no commonality with any other elements. They have had to resort to building their own e-mail, calendaring and scheduling programs in order to obtain the integration that the need. It has Mbits/sec). Its survey tools conference control facilities, and similar capabilities push it into a large conference domain. Group collaboration does not require such capability and having to support that many participants degrades the user experience in comparison to smaller numbers of participants significantly. For example, the usual conference presentation is a single large view of the speaker, which is semi-automatically “handed-off,” with thumbnails of other participants updated every few seconds.
The present invention consists of several end terminals (appliances), a set of servers which provide features not built into the appliances, and a set of gateways that connect the products to existing facilities and outside PSTN services. The basic functionality provided by the present invention is:                Telephony Services, with video available on all “on-net” calls, very high quality audio and video        Multiparty Conference Services, audio and video, ad hoc or prescheduled, completely self-serve, fully integrated into the telephony services        Presence Services—with a variety of tools to determine availability for collaboration        Shared Surface Services—electronic whiteboard, application sharing, document sharing, presentation broadcast via linked applications on an associated PC        Other value added services such as broadcast video TV distribution.        
The present invention is your telephone with dramatic new functionality, not your computer trying to do what your telephone does. This allows full concurrent use of your computer for the things that it is good at, while providing a flexible but application specific appliance for communication. The user interface and physical design can be tuned for this application, providing an instant on, highly reliable communications device like our current phones, something that the PC will never be. This approach also provides control over the operating environment of the device, eliminating the support problems related to PC hardware and software configuration issues.